Tacoma

Danielle De Picciotto is a wanderer. She explores the regions between the inner and outer realms of our collective psyche and gathers impressions, which accumulate into the many-tentacled beast that is her artistic output. Expressing the wonder of worlds invisible to most, she is initiated and an initiator, someone who has made the first steps and opens the gates for others to follow. She was born in Tacoma, Washington, but did not mark the place in her memory, as her father moved the family on shortly after her birth, due to his position in the US army. She spent her childhood all over North America until she settled as a young woman in West Berlin, a city that no longer exists. There she was caught up in the relentless creative turmoil this unique enclave had to offer and was able to interact with and influence it's community for more than two decades, co-founding the first Berlin Love Parade in 1989 with Matthias "Dr. Motte" Roeingh. Originally a fine artist, Danielle has, over the years, embraced many fields of artistic expression and, aside from large-scale paintings and her signature intricately detailed drawings, embraced literature, film, and, foremost, music to will her extraordinary vision into existence. She now presents Tacoma, her first solo album following several collaborations with Alexander Hacke (Einstürzende Neubauten) (POTOMAK 919808, POTOMAK 954952) and the first release on Gudrun Gut's Moabit label since 2008. On this album, Danielle creates sonic scenery unlike any other. Employing unusual instruments like the hurdy-gurdy and the autoharp, while accompanying her spoken-word poetry and delicate vocal stylings with multi-layered violin harmonies, she evokes imagery of lonesome desert landscapes, enchanted forests, and otherworldly trance-states while straddling maritime thunderstorms by combining recordings of nature's manifold phenomena with radio interferences, reverberating tribal percussions, electronic treatments, and the soothing and genuinely organic vibrations of acoustically generated drones and internal mantras. Her lyrics focus on the mystical implications of the nomadic life, clairvoyant renderings of female intuition, and tales of dreamlike revelations, while the instrumental pieces of this astonishing album transport the listener into paths never tread, or, like Danielle herself, who only recently returned for the first time to the place of her birth, into a journey to the beginning of time.